Poor Jennifer? Aniston is just fabulous at 50

JENNIFER Aniston turns 50 this week, an occasion which sparked roughly 9,423 articles asking why we still insist on calling the multimillionaire actress ‘poor Jen’. Except we don’t. Not in real life, anyway, although I grant you magazine editors have had a long and fruitful career picking over her various misfortunes.

They reported her marriage had broken up (it had) and her ex was now with someone else (he was), and she was heartbroken (she admitted this).

And, yes, after she met husband number two, there were many ludicrous years of bump watch: was Jen pregnant, or wasn’t she (as far as we know, she wasn’t).

But the poor Jen myth assumes that women read these stories, and having read them, then began to pity Aniston.

It presupposes there are still many women out there who honestly believe that having a successful marriage (whatever that is) and having children is the only way of really winning at life.

Who are these women? I have never met any of them. The notion that mums with kids sit around and gloat like a four-year-old who’s won the egg-and-spoon race is laughable.

Smug marrieds may have been an unavoidable fact of life for Bridget Jones, but that’s more than 20 years ago. The world has changed a lot since then.

We don’t pity Jen. Far from it: we love her films, copy her hair, admire her outfits, and envy her easy-going charm – not to mention her bank balance.

For the poor Jen myth to hold any water, we would need to live in a society that still idolised the 1950s-style domestic goddess.

But the opposite is true. Advertising billboards and magazine covers no longer depict smiling housewives in aprons with children and husbands; instead they celebrate thin, beautiful, solitary women.

And frequently they celebrate Aniston herself, in dazzling fashion shoots or in myriad ad campaigns from Smartwater to Aveeno. Far from being a figure of pity, she remains the gorgeous girlnext-door we all aspire to be.

It’s about time we buried the tired old myth of poor Jen – and with it, the myth that married women think they’re perfect.